This one isn’t pretty. Lucky McKee‘s exploitation film The Woman earned instant notoriety this past January at Sundance when a man was caught on video excoriating the film as he stormed out of a screening. That probably meant his reaction was just as the director hoped. The Woman, after all, is about a family man who finds a feral woman in the woods and decides to take her home and chain her up for his own purposes. Just based on that description you could likely predict that the trailer, below, is not safe for work.

I have friends who like this movie a lot, and I’m still perversely attracted to outre exploitation fare even though my raw appetite for it has decreased in recent years. And, with that in mind, there is something appealing in the goofy/gonzo way The Woman seems to be directed, shot and performed. I suspect that the content goes beyond the comically confrontational camera angles to create something more harrowing than wild.

The film is based on the novel The Woman, which Jack Ketchum co-wrote with Lucky McKee. That book is the third in a loose series that also includes 1980’s Off Season and 1991’s Offspring.

Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers, Deadwood) is a small town court officer living a quiet, seemingly normal life in the heart of Maine with his beloved family. That is, until Chris discovers a feral woman roaming the woods and makes it the family’s project to civilise her. But as the family’s methods of forcing civility upon the woman become ever more extreme, the perverse bonds uniting them will be cast into violent relief.